Addiction, Loss, And Redemption: How I Found My Way Back

Growing up in East Anchorage, Alaska. In high school, I was THAT kid. The  popular kid, the jock, the best player on the team kid. Coming into East High School I  had a 4.0 GPA. So add that up: good grades, great athlete and you can say ‘Wow that kid had a lot of potential’ and I did have a lot of potential. 

Coming in my senior year. I was the best high school athlete in the state of  Alaska; First Team All-State Wide Receiver and Free Safety. Guess how my senior year  ended? I got kicked off the basketball team for getting in a fight during a game. So no  more sports. A month later I was charged with a felony; a crime in the amount of 6  dollars. My face was all over the news. East Anchorage basketball star $6 bandit. I was expelled from school, lost all my scholarships, became an alcoholic, and was later sent to prison. All in 365 days. That was my 18th year. From college-bound athlete to an inmate, and an alcoholic just like that. 

Now here are 2 stats that define my life:

• Stat #1: From ages 18 to 32 every single day, every hour, every minute, of those 14  years I spent as either an alcoholic, a drug addict, or an inmate. That was my entire adult life.  

• Stat #2: Well I’m 34 now. That one year between ages 32 and 33 is the first calendar  year in my entire adult life with NOT ONE drink, NOT ONE drug, NOT ONE day in jail. 

I mentioned what happened at 18 right? Lost my scholarships, kicked out of  school, but really what happened was I lost my future. I got lost. I leaned into the streets  and the criminal lifestyle. I continued drinking and started experimenting with drugs to  somehow numb that enclosing feeling of failure from the bright future I had just blown. I used substances to convince myself I didn’t care because I didn’t want to. And if there’s one thing that narcotics are very good at, they are very effective emotional  suppressants. While I was high, I did not feel, I did not care. I did not care about how my mom felt, my younger siblings felt, I simply did not care. 

Around age 23, my life was altered indefinitely. I was sitting in a hotel with a good friend of mine getting high and drunk. I became so desensitized morally and had no acknowledgement of the  line between right and wrong. Good or bad. Careful and careless was always blurred. 

And on this night, while sitting face to face with my friend, about 3 ft from each other, he was recklessly playing with a gun, got it too close to his head, and by pure freak accident, accidentally pulled the trigger, shot himself, and he died there. 

That was the worst day of my life. Devastated, distraught, despondent, the only coping mechanism I had developed over the years was a two-part move. First: Get high.  Second: Ignore it.  

And at that moment, right after that tragedy I didn’t know what to do. There’s no rule book on how to react to that, but I did know that I couldn’t deal with it. So I decided to do  what I always did when a problem presented itself and that was ‘get high’. The problem was, I could only get my hands on one drug. And that drug was heroin. So at 23 years  old, on the worst day of my life, I made the worst decision of my life. I told myself ‘I’ll just  use heroin for two months, that’s it, to get past this grief, I’ll just do it for two months  and I’ll just quit.’ And with that drug, it just does not work like that. 

I used heroin every day for the next 2 1/2 years. I quit for one year. While I sat in prison. After I got out, I relapsed in a week and went right back to using heroin every day for the next two years. It wasn’t until I went back to prison that I finally found a way to change my ways. But it didn’t start like that. Would you believe it? I went to prison because of a crime I committed to support my drug habit, and while in prison I picked up another drug habit.  Yes, I was in prison addicted to drugs as well. But when COVID-19 came around and the world locked down, that meant no more drugs, even in prison.

I remember sitting in my prison cell, 23-hour lockdown, withdrawing, staring at the floor,  thinking to myself ‘Dude. You know what? You are the freaking problem. You have no  one to blame. You have no excuses. You got nowhere to run. IT’S YOU. YOU NEED TO CHANGE.’ 

I don’t think I ever held myself accountable for the way my life had gone all those years.  And when I looked up off that jail cell floor. I did some soul-searching. Then I started trying things. Reading. I started learning. Working out. Reading the Bible. Journalling. Meditating. And I started to feel different. Working on myself from the INSIDE/ OUT was my way out of addiction. 

Changing how I thought, which changed how I acted. Learning how to be a better person,  treating people better, telling the truth, and being generous, all these things were new to  me. 

That’s how I recreated myself from a criminal and an addict. To an author, philanthropist,  speaker, and a changed man. And to rewrite my story from a tragedy to a comeback story. 

Make no mistake, I still remember those rock bottom moments during addiction thinking: ‘I cannot believe that I cannot overcome this addiction’ or ‘I cannot believe that I’m going out like this, I’m going to die a junkie’. I can still remember thinking that was how I was going to die.

So while I still can feel those chills in my skin from that period of my life I don’t  have to live in that anymore.

What I live in now is a newfound fondness for the entire human experience. I don’t know what kept me hanging in there that one more hour, one more day, one more morning, one more night when I had given up on life. But I held on and God intervened and my luck finally changed.  

I don’t know what it is about the human being that gives them the strength to get back on their feet after being knocked down again. Not to give up. To keep fighting. To try one more time. I don’t know what it is about us, but I do know that we all have it. We all have that courage, the resilience, the preservation to fruition to rebuild ourselves, remold our character, reshape our future, reinvent ourselves in any way we choose. We all can rewrite our stories. We all have comeback stories. Thanks for listening to mine.